Saturday, July 05, 2014

ONE WORD is missing from the Media's and the State's narrative of this trial>If it was murder, what was the MOTIVE?

Prosecutors have not disclosed a motive for the alleged murder, but one of their witnesses may testify that Pistorius had a temper. - NBC

With Oscar refusing to admit that he intended to kill an intruder, he is trying to stop the state’s attempt to get him on grounds of dolus eventualis. Gerrie Nel has pointed out on many occasions that it is inconceivable for someone to fire four shots at a possible intruder without foreseeing the possible outcome or consequences of this action, a form of intention with knowledge of possible outcomes i.e. dolus eventualis. - TwoOceansvibe

The athlete was evaluated by four specialists as a day-patient to determine if he was, “at the time of the commission of the offence criminally responsible” and if he could appreciate the “wrongfulness of his actions and act according to that appreciation”. Judge Thokozile Masipa ordered the three psychiatrists and one clinical psychologist to evaluate Pistorius to determine whether his general anxiety disorder and his disability would have had any significant effect on him when he killed his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp on Valentine’s Day last year. - DestinyMan

These are all questions Nel put to Pistorius, who contested that “nothing was normal about that night.”“I have difficulty with the huge leap from shooting an intruder to shooting at Reeva,” Nel said of Pistorius’s testimony that it immediately dawned on him that it was Steenkamp in the bathroom.“I understand that it doesn’t sound rational, but I didn’t have a rational state of mind,” Pistorius responded. - TheDailyBeast

Nel began by pointing out that Pistorius had heard the first noise, then got his gun before advancing cautiously down the passage towards the bathroom.The prosecutor was trying to show that Pistorius had time for conscious thought after he was first frightened and before shooting, but a concession along these lines proved difficult to obtain from the witness.At one point, Derman complained that he didn’t understand the “point” Nel was making or the “sequencing of the questions”.Judge Thokozile Masipa replied: “I’m not sure that it should be your concern, counsel decides how he is going to ask his questions. If you cannot assist because you don’t know, you simply say you don’t know.”Nel repeated: “In an incident like this where there’s a startle, with accused finding a gun, knowing where it is, getting a gun ready to fire, going to the bathroom, killing someone, would that still make sense to you if there was just one startle?”“No, there would need to be more startles,” replied Derman.Nel later moved on to Pistorius’ potential motives at the time of the shooting.“If I put it to you that … he heard a sound and he fired at the sound to kill the person inside the toilet, you cannot say it’s not so?”Derman cautiously conceded: “He fired at the sound and I’m sure that was to nullify any threat.” - CityPress

What's interesting, also is the near-deafening silence of those in Oscar Pistorius inner circle. His family, his agents, mutual friends, his sponsors, the fawning media. Is the media and are the schlebs still invested to the hilt in [and here's a HINT] protecting their BRANDS? Like this guy:

Note: The CityPress article quoted in bold above wrongly suggests that a sound and motive are linked. A sound may (or may not) bring about an instinctual response, which would show intent, or lack of intentional action. This line of thought is used not to show motive, but to show an ABSENCE of either intent or motive or both.

No one is seriously interrogating the possibility of an INTENTIONAL act, and a MOTIVE to murder. We have a door, and four bullets fired through it. Two people in a house. One disabled, the other dead. Similar to the Griekwastad case you have:

1) large amounts of money involved (and imminently even larger amounts about to be involved)

2) a sexual element (unbalanced)

3) an accused who does not see, hear or do anything

4) the potential for access (or the security, or maintenance) to these resources - mostly financial - severely threatened by...an incident with cataclysmic consequences in terms of reputational damage.

If you you're getting excited and you're thinking I'm talking about motive here, no, I'm still in the realms of INTENT, but not quite there. I'm not going to reveal motive here [in a blog post]. What I will say...is it's easier for an accused to rationalise their own motive/s when they have massive vested interests in terms of enormous amounts of money (property etc) and these resources - they believe, are also at their disposal - and can be used to mount the best defence money can buy.

And we're not even going to interrogate motive?

Are we afraid we won't find something, or are we afraid that we might?

Are we hypnotised by a version to such a degree that we can't think critically and intuit something more rational, and realistic.

It was Valentine's Day. [Griekwastad - it was Good Friday]. Did these days have no significance whatsoever?

And are we afraid that after a year and a half we may finally realise the full extent of the 'accident'. Accident is another word for mistake. It's the word you use to say you didn't do it on purpose, ie. that you had no motive.

But what if the assertion isn't true to begin with? IOW what if I say it was an accident when really I did act on purpose, I did have very good (?) reason to do what I did (or thought I did in the heat of the moment) but after I did it...and took stock...I realised I'd made a terrible mistake. But that's a different kind of mistake altogether, isn't it?

Motive is an entirely different narrative. When you are dealing with re-framing a narrative you have to be prepared to accept that you may have made some mistakes...you believed certain things about yourself/others that weren't/aren't true. That's not always a good experience, because it means we've been kidding ourselves. No one likes to admit they've duped, or been duped.

Mistakes are one thing, but evidence tends to leave a trail that asks questions beyond mistakes. If you fire 4 shots, and 3/4 are on target, and you need to balance against a wall (which he did), then you have intent, but what is the motive? No one is asking this question at face value because they believe it is:

a) too speculative

b) in addition to a) no supporting evidence

c) there's still an implicit sympathy for the fallen hero (in other words, we still accept his own narrative, and we still accept that as a hero he was incapable of murder - same as OJ Simpson)

4) we are afraid to challenge the presiding narrative because to do so causes us uncertainty. If this guy isn't who he says he is, what does that say about me, and my world?

And we don't take any of this further for the same reason no one bothered to check whether it was actually, scientifically fair if Oscar competed with able-bodied runners. This is the underlying narrative in RESURRECTION which flowed into the motive narrative (though I didn't realise it at the time). No one bothered to check, to measure if Oscar had an advantage on his artificial legs over able-bodied runners.

Except that's not true.

There were tests.

There were measurements.

There was a scientific finding. [Read Resurrection to explore all that].

And in this case, do we have any evidence to support an assumption of guilt Is there any evidence of a motive. No. If there was the state would have found it. Because they haven't, there can't be a motive. Because there is no obvious evidence, there is no motive.

But.

Actually.

There is.

You may think no evidence is no evidence, but consider Oscar's cellphone (whose PIN he couldn't remember). We now know he was ALWAYS on his phone. We see him on his phone (presumably a new phone) even in court.

We know he had his phone on him when he carried Reeva's body downstairs, he had it with him downstairs in the kitchen while the police were running around upstairs.

We even know, by his own admission that immediately after shooting Reeva, while she was alive but bleeding to death, he was fiddling with his phone [to call for an ambulance...oh yes, I'd use someone else's phone to do that...never-mind we all know cellphone handsets are universally access-controlled.]

It's also unfortunate that Nel didn't call Gina Myers to ask whether Reeva had a PIN on her phone. It's possible Myers would never have noticed, but someone might have, and an audit of the phone would have proved this [PIN protection] in any case.

It's interesting that the police, and Oscar's sister, and Aimee Pistorius, and the neighbour's would have been aware at the time or subsequently, that all handsets had been seized as evidence. But not Oscar's.
And that's okay?
Did he give it to his sister? Did the police not find it, or was he able to persuade them to let him hold onto it for a few days. Did he conceal the fact that he had his phone, or did he use it and sit simply [incredibly] didn't come up in the conversation.

Here's the kicker. If Oscar wiped the memory of his phone, he would have needed time to do so. He could have done it in public or in private, but given how crucial cellphone evidence is, Oscar is likely to have realised what he needed to do, and so would have methodically wiped the iPhone 5's memory in private. In secret.

Let's reflect for a moment that it is cellphone data that ultimately locked in the timeline for the Griekwastad murders. A final sms by the boy's mother along with his ETA at the police station was what finally exposed his version as both improbable and highly unlikely.

Ironically, we have similar timelines in this case, where neighbour's calls to security and Oscar's own calls provide a fairly narrow timeline. In other words, within the irrefutable facts of these cellphone records, let's call it scientific data (ie verifiable information), a narrative has to be placed that makes sense. Oscar's doesn't. Time is simply one aspect that is out of sync. Also the time that Reeva ate, and Reeva smsed to say she wasn't coming 'home' to the Myers that night.

Here's why the evidence on gastric emptying is so crucial to determining what happened on the night Reeva Steenkamp was shot.

The defence says Steenkamp ate around 7pm, and she and Pistorius went to sleep at 10pm.

The prosecution says the stomach contents indicate she ate around 2am. They say this suggests the couple were awake – and arguing – before the shooting.

It's not disputed that Steenkamp was shot at around 3am

Even if a cellphone isn't used on the day of a crime, it can fully contextualize behaviour, showing movements, showing communications, showing, in other words, general intent. A single Valentine's Day message to Oscar from one of his masses of adoring female fans - just one - would have called into question his narrative of devotion and dedication to Reeva.

So it is pertinent that NO DATA was retrieved. As such we have to wonder, what might this data have revealed? Why would Oscar wipe its memory if he did (and yes, he very likely did).

The phone would have been crucial to supporting a possible motive, and so without the phone, we have a setback. We have to forget about motive. Right? Wrong. That's not my argument. It's Oscar's and I think the state have accepted it too.

That's a mistake.

I know why. Well, I'm 99% certain.

I've pieced it all together.

Have a look at RESURRECTION Book #3 in my Oscar Pistorius Trial 5 part series. It interrogates Oscar's chances of competing in able-bodied sport, it investigates his chances at winning an appeal and the final three chapters provide the first compelling case for MOTIVE.

- The Media are not mentioning it because they believe it is unknown and unknowable (or perhaps they want to draw this story out for as long as they can before bringing it to resolution.)

- The State are not mentioning it because if they are wrong on any detail, they can throw away their case. In other words, the State are taking a conservative approach.

- RESURRECTION for the first time provides context, intent and motive.It provides a new, alternative narrative to the one sold to and leveraged by the media. In other words, it's not Oscar's narrative of who Oscar is, it's an updated version made by a third party. Is it accurate? Is it more accurate than Oscar's version? Well, you have to check one set of facts to another. And a good practice exercise for this is the able-bodied/disabled narrative. That was a false narrative, and Oscar's entire persona was based on it. So what does that tell us about his relationships with facts, reality, science and rationalising.

I have used all of these to piece together a new narrative. I believe this one is better, and more authentic. They're closer to the real Oscar than the original narrative. The original asks us to make assumptions and take beliefs on face value. We do because they are positive and seem to inspire us, but are they true?

Using dates, the stated intentions of Oscar Pistorius, his agent Peet Van Zyl, Capacity Relations (Reeva Steenkamp's PR company) and crucially the social media evidence in the public domain, I've pieced together a new narrative. I've also interrogated the media's narrative in this regard.

Bluster? One prominent journalist who I provided the original word.docx of the final three chapters said the following:

As of right now, I have motive. Nobody else does, not the media, nor the state, nor any of the so-called scrum of expert commentators on Carte Blanche's Oscar Trial Channel. There may be one other person in the world right now who knows the same thing I do. I'll give you one guess who that might be...

RESURRECTIONS (Amazon Kindle Bestseller Rank #24 on 5/07/2014) is currently available as part of a 207 page eBook here. You don't need a Kindle or specific eBook reader. All you need is a computer, laptop, smartphone + internet connection + download this free app. The first few pages are free, otherwise you can purchase the entire eBook, 207 pages for $3.41. That's about R34, the price of a magazine.

If you do read it, be sure to let me know what you thought @HiRezlife or email me at nickvanderleek[at][gmail][dot][com].

JUST PUBLISHED...the true story behind Steven Avery #MAKINGAMURDERER

Now available at your Kindle Store!

The Force Awakens is finally available on Amazon Kindle!

Is Luke Rey's father? What did that Force Vision mean? And much more!!!

It's here at last!

The story of our visit to the Steenkamp family and our firsthand impressions of what when on in court, behind the scenes...

FUGITIVE - catch it now!

Click on the image to buy FUGITIVE now!

Want to read a Kindle ebook but don't have a Kindle? No sweat - just download the free app!

Click on the image for the download link to the free Amazon Kindle app. Note: You may also need to register on Amazon if you aren't already.,

IT'S HERE! DECEIT Book #1 of our Brand New Series!

Click on the image to buy DECEIT now!

AVAILABLE NOW! Book # 2 in the Bestselling #Shakedown Series

DARK MATTER digs deeper into the five days of intense police investigation immediately following the discovery of the British exchange student sharing a house with Amanda Knox.

Did she or didn't she? UNDER SUSPICION covers new territory providing new answers and new questions

Download the free Kindle App [details below the book cover on the left]. Click on the image to buy this earth-shaking read now!

YAY!! It's here! OBSCURITY is Book # 6 the final book in our bestselling series on Jodi Arias

It's excellent value too! Click on the link to order this book on Amazon. You may need to download a free Kindle App in order to read it on your digital device.

Book # 5 in our Bestselling series on Jodi Arias COMING SOON!

Click on the image to buy OBSCENITY now!

IT'S FINALLY HERE!!!...Book 4 in this Bestselling Series...

Click on the image to purchase this book.

AUTHENTICITY IS OUT NOW!!! The first book with exclusive updates to the crazy Jodi Arias Case!

It’s not for nothing that Jane Valez-Mitchell’s book, Shanna Hogan’s book and our books all show two Jodi’s on our covers. Authenticity provides further insights as to WHY...click on the image to find out why now.

It's HERE! The sensational follow-up to the runaway hit AUDACITY, focusing on the Penalty Phase...

After 7 years it came down to 1 juror. Click on the image to find out what happened.

Jodi Arias spent an unprecedented 18 days on the stand. Click on the image to find out why...

Shooter for hire

Nick van der Leek, bestselling author of REEVA IN HER OWN WORDS and co-author (with Lisa Wilson) of AUDACITY, is a prolific and versatile photojournalist. Nick has a client portfolio that includes the Square Kilometre Array (South Africa), John Williams, Mercedes Benz, Harmony Gold, The Free State Provincial Government, The Blue Train and many others. Nick has written for an incredible portfolio of magazines, from sport (Ironman, Bicycling, Cycling Weekly, Tour de France magazine, Fitness for Him) to travel (Country Life, Go!, Getaway, South, Franschhoek Style, Explore) to high brow publications focused on men's issues, IT, and economics (GQ, Men's Health, Financial Mail, Finweek, Brainstorm, ABSA Capital magazine). He has photographed and/or interviewed world champions, experts and celebrities, including Morgan Freeman, Lewis Pugh, Tyler Hamilton, Roland Schoeman,Miss World 2009, Gavin Hood, Chris Froome, Cameron van der Burgh, Professor Tim Noakes, Ronnie Apteker, Derick Joubert and more. Nick is a regular contributor to GQ, Afropolitan, Fitness, Country Life and Travel Ideas. In 2005 Nick completed an Ironman and performed at a provincial level in the following sports: triathlon, biathlon, swimming and football. To book a shoot, or share YOUR story, contact Nick at 072 821 9387 or email nickvanderleek[AT]gmail[DOT]com. You can also find him on Facebook.

Book 1. Reeva in her own Words - click the image to view the eBook

Click on the image for more information.

Book 2 of 5 in the Oscar Trial Series. Click the image to read a review by Jacques Steenkamp.

Click the image to read a review.

AVAILABLE NOW- on Amazon Kindle> click the image to see more!

Interviews with Oscar's former agent, analysis from SA's top legal minds and unanswered questions. Click on the above image to purchase *Resurrection* now.

Book 4 Revelations

Revelations reveals how the incident on February 14, 2013 could actually have happened. Click the image for more info.

Book 5 RESTITUTIO

AVAILABLE NOW! Click the image to find out more.

Book 6 Transcendence

Click on the image to find out more about this Amazon eBook...

Book 7 #RS

Click on the image to find out more...or to purchase this Amazon eBook...

Book 8 RESTORATION

Click on the image to find out more.

It's here: THE WORLD'S MOST ADVANCED EVERYTHING!

A tour de force of science and the world's latest and best technology.

More about me and what I do: Nick van der Leek’s top 10 tips for SA freelance journalists

Click on the image to read my Freelance Tips.

Visual Collage of my Photojournalism

If you would like to commission a story, click on the image to send an email.

Christopher Ulysses, in a bid to escape a dying, freezing Europe, embarks on an epic journey South.

Click on the image to buy this book

Confessions of a Failed Writer

Click on the image to follow my chronicles of misery and failure...

A collection of CHOICE photojournalism journeys

Click on the image to find out more.

Hard-hitting, grueling, controversial. AMERICAN TRAITOR interrogates the American Sniper murderer

Click the image for more.

Pageviews last month

Traffic

Have you heard of Nascar Shitstorius? Armless Olympic legend, became the world famous 'Blade Rower'

Follow by Email

Nick van der Leek's PORTFOLIO

people places perspectives

Pierneef Country - latest photojournalism in February 2012 Country Life

Tinus de Jongh's contribution to South African art

I believe the fount of my creativity comes from the de Jongh side of my family. Tinus is my great grandfather. Read more about him here, http://www.tinusdejongh.co.za/ or click the image above to view his art.

Family Ties - JOAN SCHRAUWEN

Joan Schrauwen is a water colorist, sculptor and author based in Veldrif, on the West Coast. From her home on the banks of the Berg River, she draws inspiration for her fine art and writing. Joan is my aunt, and the granddaughter of Tinus de Jongh.

Family Ties

Despite having two engineering degrees - civil and electro-mechanical - my brother elected to follow his passion - painting - full time. Being the great grandson of Tinus de Jongh, it was only natural that his artistic evolution would develop along similar lines. Casey's courage and consistency also played a huge role in inspiring me to follow my passion - into writing, photography and generally expressing myself artistically. Click on the image above to link to my brother's webpage.

Phil Liggett meets SHOOT

The Voice of Cycling meets Mr Trigger Happy

James Kunstler and NVDL

I met James Kunstler at Osmond Lange Architects celebratory dinner in Melrose Arch.

James Kunstler discusses New Urbanism in South Africa

Click on the image to listen to this Podcast

The barefoot revolution

The hunt to reverse-engineer the world’s most advanced running shoe. - click on the image to read the article

Country Life

My brother and I go in search of Tinus de Jongh

Contributor to Lonely Planet's SEOUL guide

I lived in Seoul for 4 years; where I rediscovered my love for travel, for writing and so travel writing was a natural permutation.